Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Staunton, December 10 – More than
anyone else, the Russian authorities are interested in promoting xenophobia as
part of their effort to promote solidarity by identifying an enemy, according
to a senior Moscow scholar, who suggest that today “the ideal enemy” for them
would be “a gay Central Asian.”

“The
[ethnic] Russian nation is not xenophobic” by nature, the sociologist continued,
“but [the authorities and the media they control] are making it that way.”

Mukomel’s
observations were only some of the many interesting ones offered by speakers to
a December 6 Moscow conference on “The Role of Civil Society in Securing
Inter-Ethnic Peace and Harmony.”

Aleksandr
Zhuravsky, director of the regional affairs ministry’s nationality relations
department, said that the main thing is for the country to focus on the goals
set down in the government’s Strategy for the Government’s Nationality Policy
through 2025. But other speakers were more open and critical.

Vyacheslav
Postavnin, president of the Migration 21st Century Foundation,
suggested that the country needed some special “open spaces” where “simple
people and the authorities at the municipal level could without dissimulating
discuss inter-ethnic problems,” including those involving migration, openly

Andrey Klychkov, head of
the KPRF fraction in the Moscow city duma, predicted that “the pogroms in
Biryulevo are only the beginning of a large process which will become more
serious because bureaucrats are ‘protecting’ organizations” that use illegal
workers and justifying it by invoking “big projects” like the World Cup or the Olympics.According to the deputy,
the country’s migration problems arise from the current economic system which
seeks to extract maximum profits through the use of what is little more than
slave labor. “Such a model has nothing in common with economic competitiveness,”
whatever the Kremlin says.

Klychkov said
that the current economic system is also leading to the formation of ethnic enclaves
and ghettoes which are closed off to one another and to the larger society because
the Kremlin and its allies among the owners of major firms are “using
nationalism as a weapon against the solidarity of the toilers.”

Aleksandr Muzykantsky, Moscow city’s
human rights ombudsman, placed the blame for current problems elsewhere. He
said that there had not been enough “serious research” on the preparation of
Russian society to accept and absorb people of different cultures or on how
ready the latter were to adapt by giving up traditions like polygamy.

But he agreed with other speakers
that immigration was going to continue despite problem because of “the super
profits” that commercial structures were earning and the relationship of those
structures to the regime itself.The
government has the ability to fine those who employ gastarbeiters illegally,
but it isn’t using it.

Participants in the meeting
disagreed on what the Russian government should do next. Gadzhimet Safaraliyev,
who heads the Duma’s committee on nationalities, argued that all these
questions should be handed over to a new government organ that could then
resolve them.Zhuravsky, whose own
institution would then be superseded, said he was opposed to that idea.